What’s worse than BIG DUF? A BIG DIC!
Most agile people say big designs up front rarely pay off. You spend so much time doing design that you delay the opportunity of feedback from real, working software. But I sometimes do BIG DUF. It’s not that the design is big, it’s the problem that is big. So I need an up front big picture with just a few big parts.
It helps me conquer and divide.
That’s not a bad thing. What I find really painful is casting the design in concrete. When your design is cast, then your mental state is already cast in concrete too. And that means that it is a lot harder to do the right things. So, more gets added to the concrete slab and it’s real hard work to break anything off. When I have a BIG DUF, I often look at how to reduce it, rather than increase it.
I don’t think it’s wrong to have a BIGDUF, it’s worse if you have a BIGDIC (BIG Design in Concrete). That concrete block will hurt you later … a lot.
In other words, the size of a BIGDIC does not matter, it’s the rigidity that’s the problem (– That’s so lame, I could not resist!)
